Although the postemancipation era stands as one of the most significant periods in United States history, the role of self-professed Christians, their rhetoric, and their theology-inflected visions of post–Civil War America in shaping national politics remains understudied amid a host of texts dedicated to the racial politics of the period. In Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South, Elizabeth L. Jemison traces the varied ways black and white Christians reimagined the southern landscape and debated questions of citizenship using theology, biblical imagery, and moral logics calibrated to support their respective political agendas. Exploring the discursive productions of former Confederates, free and freed African Americans, and white Northern missionaries, Jemison neatly substantiates her primary argument that blacks and whites each claimed “Christian citizenship”—a mode of national belonging premised upon the inextricability of Christianity and American citizenship—yet did so toward different ends (2–3). Whereas former Confederates fashioned themselves as the long-suffering Israelites living out God's plan for human hierarchy, free and freed black people decried the hypocrisy of whites’ anti-black violence and pointed disenfranchisement. Set in the Lower Mississippi Valley between 1863 and roughly 1900, but with an eye toward twenty-first-century politics, Christian Citizens tells the contentious story of white southerners’ reconfiguration of proslavery Christian apologia to support their supremacist sociopolitical agendas and black Christians’ campaigns for rights amid the violence of the era.
Though primarily focused on former Confederates, Jemison juxtaposes northern missionaries and proslavery southerners to highlight how white Christians’ assessments of black people's incapacity for self-governance mirrored one another, despite opposing political stances. Following the arc of pivotal historical events, she narrates how the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments galvanized former Confederates around the language of “sacrifice” and fueled their understanding of themselves as victims of Northern radicalism. More importantly, Christian rhetorical and literary platforms functioned as outlets for white supremacist views during the Reconstruction period when Republican reforms and black male enfranchisement diminished former white Confederates’ power (64–65).
By analyzing the Christian infrastructure of anti-black politics, Jemison shows how white supremacist ideas of Christian citizenship authorized the violence of the “Redemption” era and beyond. More than a hyperbolic political term, “Redemption” was powered by white Confederates’ visions of the restoration of order via their rightful re-ascension to the apex of the divinely ordained social power hierarchy. Beginning her discussion of the period between 1875 and 1879 with the murder of over one hundred black Americans in Colfax, Louisiana, and the campaign of voter intimidation known as the Mississippi Plan of 1875, she foregrounds the violent vigilantism that enabled white Christians to overthrow democratically elected state and local governments in the interest of white supremacist “law and order” (77). She expands her sources beyond church records to illuminate the role of the media, specifically newspapers, in propagating sensationalist tales of black and Republican violence to support Southern Democrats’ myth of anti-black violence as self-defense. As Jemison demonstrates, the retrenchment of a virulent, pre–Civil War brand of anti-blackness in turn-of-the-century segregationist policies occurred through careful racial mythmaking, which allied citizenship with whiteness and excluded blacks regardless of their achievements.
Conversely, a number of black ministers tied Christian citizenship to gendered notions of “independent manhood,” which translated to literacy, economic independence, temperance, and education (52–53). As northern and southern whites willfully ignored black Protestants’ agency, black male ministers used their denominational publications to counter white publications’ representations of black people's alleged sexual deviance and to expose the horrific acts of violence perpetrated against black people at the hands of white supremacist Christians. Though African Methodist Episcopal (AME) ministers and churches assume a central role in Jemison's narrative owing to their public political involvement, she offers the sociopolitically conservative Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) church as a counterpoint to images of black Protestants as universally progressive in their responses to white supremacy. CME church members chose cooperation that bordered on obsequiousness to achieve limited gains, while AME and other progressive church members provided spaces for the Tennessee State Convention of Colored Men and other political meetings.
Jemison's focus on denominational publications and the rhetoric of black ministers from the AME and CME Churches, among others, reveal black male Christians’ disparate responses to white paternalism and the patriarchal, heteronormative visions of citizenship that plagued mainline black Christian denominations. As she traces the sociopolitical responses of the Reconstruction period, black women's experiences hover on the edges of the narrative—remarked upon only inasmuch as they were props for black ministers’ and white commentators’ disparate agendas. Jemison acknowledges that her use of published sermons, denominational publications, and other printed source material mutes female perspectives and presences in Christian Citizens until black male disenfranchisement prompted Ida B. Wells-Barnett and others to pursue more well-documented outlets for advocacy. More studies that expand the definition of “politics” to include acts and agendas beyond enfranchisement will undoubtedly lead to source material that captures the activities of black females who waged intra- and interracial battles for rights, education, safety, and independence (Nicole Myers Turner, Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020]).
Among Jemison's most important contributions is her methodological focus on race-making through Christian idioms and within Christian spaces. She makes clear that Christian theological discourses and church spaces were spaces where Americans negotiated and debated the meanings of blackness, whiteness, and citizenship in the wake of slavery's demise. More than private impulses that motivated sociopolitical decision-making and violence, Christian vocabularies, leaders, and forums provided the infrastructure for racial and electoral politics in the New South. In the end, she poetically returns to a meditation on contemporary twenty-first-century politics and the continued prevalence of the language of law and order to justify anti-black violence. Read alongside her historical interventions, Jemison's point is clear: US society is still wrestling with the afterlives of proslavery, Christian rhetoric. In making this claim, she invites historians and students of history to reflect upon the fraught meanings of citizenship and the long reach of the histories they create.
